Re: ?Web Security

Actually there is a lot of this going on right now at all companies. There have been so many cutbacks and layoffs that many IT groups are without good help because the expensive folks that knew what they were doing got laid off. I know of many stories like this. For instance there is a medium size company here in Houston that now has windows help desk people maintaining $250,000 worth of Sun production servers and all they got was one Sun System admin 1 class. In the case above instead of hiring a competent programmer some manager looks better on paper by telling the girl that makes a lousy 35k a year to "learn perl". The good news is that capitalism is booms and busts and eventually things will turn around and companies will start spending again.

Cheers

JSchmitz

Comment on Re: ?Web Security

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Re^2: ?Web Security
by leocharre (Priest) on Apr 05, 2006 at 18:16 UTC

I started doing sensitive web coding maybe 3 years ago. At the time I was getting paid 21.5k as a graphic designer (i was desperate). This was a small company

The owner was a salesman. Talked a lot of sh1+ to clients. .. things like 'and javascript is a technology we are ready to create for you- we have mastered a specific way that only we use to place javascript on your website for your... 'and 'we have understood how google works and we have figured out how we can get you a top spot in google..' you get the idea. It was excruciating to hear. You had to excuse yourself mid-meeting.

I had not done any real web coding- but the company had some intereting opportunities.- and .. hiring a real coder was out of the question.. you might as well have suggested 'why don't we blow up our cars in the parking lot?'

So.. I took to doing some stuff. Latern on it got to bigger stuff... and then people appeared with little budgets and serious needs.. and the company was happy to provide.

The boss harassed to no end - saying if a project was not complete soon - it would be given to some macromedia flash designer.

I tried to explain . .. look.. this is what can go wrong.. I'm debugging because it's a little harder to do this the right way. This really happens out there.. no.. seriously.. is it working? yes.. can we make it live? oh god no.. it's just for testing. - things would chill out for a bit but then.. the pressure as if nothing had been discussed.

Where is it? are you done? Why does it have to be perfect? they are not paying for perfect! we don't want perfect! what's taking so long, it should be a 5 hour project! --- and you try not to lose it and say 'we're taking online payments here from people, we are handling financial data, this is not a 5 hour project- we are doing this from scratch - why did you quote for 6 hours before you let me see the scope of the project?'

I almost lost my job and certainly lost my reputation - and any kind of references - working at that kind of place. There was tremendous pressure to do a quick dirty job on some potentially dangerous stuff.

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